Ina Donna Coolbrith was an American poet, writer and librarian. She was the first California Poet Laureate and the first poet laureate of any American state.
Background
Coolbrith was born Josephine Donna Smith on March 10, 1841, at the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois. She was the daughter of Agnes Coolbrith Moulton Smith and Don Carlos Smith, a prominent Mormon, and printer of The Times and the Seasons. His brother, Joseph Smith, was the Mormon prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Josephine’s mother called her “Ina,” and she later adopted the name of Ina Donna Coolbrith. The family experienced much tragedy during Ina’s early life. When she was five years old, her father passed away. In June of 1844, when she was three, her uncles Hyram and Joseph Smith were murdered by an anti-Mormon mob in a jailhouse near Carthage, Illinois. Their brother, Samuel, died of shock and exhaustion during a ride to rescue them. Although the Mormon community began their flight westward to avoid persecution in early 1846, Ina’s mother decided to stay. The Mormons eventually settled in Utah.
In the same year, Agnes Coolbrith married a non-Mormon, the lawyer and printer William Pickett, who denounced the persecution and supported the Mormons. The family moved to St. Louis, Missouri, in September, and she agreed to hide her Mormon past.
In 1847, Agnes gave birth to twin boys, and three years later the Picketts uprooted again, this time to join the gold rush in California. Their wagon train journey took seven months, and the ten-year-old Ina was deeply affected by the trip. She would later write that it was during this trip that she found the desire to write, overwhelmed by the dreary, abandoned wagons, the miserable animals and the human suffering.
The family first landed in Marysville, and her stepfather took up gold prospecting and mining in the Plumas County mines, but the harsh winter resulted in swollen waters and floods that crushed Pickett’s enterprise. They moved to San Francisco for a short period, during which their house was burglarized and burned down. Finally, they settled in Los Angeles in 1855. At this time, Los Angeles was a small frontier town of two thousand inhabitants, mostly of Mexican or Amerindian descent.
Education
Coolbrith started her first formal education in a newly opened school in Los Angeles, where she stayed for three years. It was here that she published her first poems under the name “Ina” in the local press. In October of 1923, she was granted an honorary M.A. from Mills College.
Career
Coolbrith’s first published poem, “My Childhood Home,” appeared in the “Poet’s Corner” of the Los Angeles Star on August 30, 1856, when she was only fifteen. In it, she idealizes her life in St. Louis, where the cottage in the poem is “far away o’er ocean’s white foam.” Her subsequent work in the Star was entitled “Ally,” and was published on November 8, 1856. Again, she reveals a romantic sentimentality, writing about a “child angel,” who sleeps where “the white lily from her tomb springeth.”
After her divorced with her husband, she moved to San Francisco with the Picketts in September of 1862 and adopted the name of Ina Donna Coolbrith. She took a job teaching English at a private school for three years.
In 1868, Anton Roman founded the Overland Monthly; Harte was the editor, and he named Coolbrith as co-editor with Stoddard. Her writings garnered her a growing local reputation through various Californian journals, and she developed relationships with Bay Area writers. She also made a name for herself in the East, publishing in the Century and Harper’s Weekly. Coolbrith, Harte, and Stoddard came to be known as the “Golden Gate Trinity.” Together, they enjoyed a fraternal inspiration and camaraderie, and they formed what was probably the best editorial team in the history of the Overland, although they only lasted there a few years. The dignified and peaceful days of the Overland, which published sixty-eight of Coolbrith’s poems, lasted from 1868 to 1875. The first edition of the Overland was released in July of 1868, and it featured poems by Harte and Coolbrith, as well as Mark Twain’s “By Rain through France.” The Golden Gate Trio would often spend time together at Coolbrith’s house, and their little society helped to elevate to a stature of the periodical. Coolbrith’s influence upon the group was strong. At one time, she dissuaded Harte from printing a caustic review of Joaquin Miller’s poetry and convinced him to print instead her positive essay on the subject. She saw Cincinnatus Hiner Miller as her protege and was the one who suggested he change his name change to Joaquin.
In addition to the departure of her friends in the early 1870s, she went through a series of tragedies throughout the mid-1870s that pushed her writing career aside.
In the mid-1870s, she also had to forgo her dreams of traveling to Europe in search of a larger audience, as she was obliged to care for Calle Shasta, the orphaned niece, and nephew of Joaquin Miller’s Amerindian daughter. With the twins earning little money, Coolbrith had a very serious financial burden on her shoulders, one that could not be assuaged by poetry alone. She relocated to Oakland, where she took a job at the public library in 1874, and soon became a source of inspiration to many of Oakland’s youth. Both Jack London and dancer Isadore Duncan would later pay homage to her guidance. However, her intense poetic lifestyle had come to end.
Though she received public support for her situation, her career in Oakland came to an end. Writing for the November 27, 1892, edition of the San Francisco Examiner, a journalist said that she “ranks first among California poets,” but that “other duties have stepped between her and the work which would have been most congenial.”
Coolbrith was forced to resign from the Oakland library in 1893. In the same year, she visited the World’s Columbian Exposition, where she was the guest of honor and participated in the dedication of the building’s “Pampas Palace.” She was popularly received for her literary accomplishments during trips to New England and New York, where she was the guest of honor at the annual reception of the Author’s Club in 1894. She also gave lectures based on her knowledge of western authors, two of which were titled “The Indian of Romance,” and “Reminiscences of Early California Writers.”
In 1897, after several years of illness, Coolbrith became the librarian of the San Francisco Mercantile Library. Two years later, she transferred to the Bohemian Club Library, where she was made the only female honorary member, and remained there until 1906. That same year, her Russian Hill home and all of her papers were destroyed by an earthquake and fire. She abandoned her plan to write a history of frontier letters. Afflicted by serious rheumatism, she spent winters in New York, where her illness was somewhat alleviated.
Coolbrith’s esteem in the literary circles of San Francisco grew: she was a symbol of the golden past. In 1915, the governor of California named Coolbrith the state’s first poet laureate, an honor that the California state legislature made official in 1919, for her organization of the Congress of Authors and Journalists for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. The poet’s notoriety grew modestly, and she accumulated a small following in the East.
Coolbrith died at the age of eighty-seven in Berkeley, California, and was buried next to her mother in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.
Achievements
Ina Coolbrith is known as a lyric poet of California’s Golden Era of the 1860s. Her work was published in periodicals alongside work of such literary luminaries as Bret Harte and Charles Warren Stoddard, members of the “Golden Gate Trinity”, also known as the “Overland Trinity”, of which she was the only female member. It was a distinction that gained her popular notoriety.
Active in the literary scene of California, Coolbrith moved in a circle of writers that included Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, and Joaquin Miller. She was one of the pioneers of the poetry of the American West and left behind a legacy of three books and about 250 uncollected poems. She was California’s first state poet laureate.
In 1933, the University of California established the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Poetry Prize, given annually to authors of the best unpublished poems written by undergraduate students enrolled at the University of the Pacific, Mills College, Stanford University, Santa Clara University, Saint Mary's College of California, and any of the University of California campuses.
In 2001, a $63,000 sculpture by Scott Donahue was placed in Oakland's central Frank Ogawa Plaza, adjacent to Oakland City Hall. By late 2004, the sculpture had been removed to a remote former industrial site called Union Point Park on the Oakland Estuary, opening to the public in 2005.
Affected by tragedy during her lifetime, Coolbrith published work that dealt with the themes of religion, loneliness, and the beauty of the natural world.
Although Coolbrith had an active and seemingly charmed social life, she maintained a dark and oftentimes desperate outlook.
Membership
Coolbrith was an honorary member of the Bohemian Club.
Personality
Though Coolbrith possessed a strong, traditional poetic technique and a mature style, Coolbrith remained a relatively minor writer.
Quotes from others about the person
“Ina Coolbrith was not a great poet, in fact, she scarcely reached the level of achievement that may be credited to a score of American women poets; but there is no doubt that she belongs among the few whose lives being infinitely rich and dominant, were the more conspicuous because framed with the song.”
“There seems to be no doubt that Ina Coolbrith has not yet been accorded her due place in American poetry.” - Lionel Stevenson
“Much of Coolbrith's work rests on the contrast between the promise offered by the world of nature and the harsher reality of the world of mankind; the recurrence of titles such as ‘Longing,’ ‘Question and Answer,’ ‘Respite,’ and ‘Withheld’ suggests even to the most casual reader the fundamental anguish which her social and literary success could not entirely assuage.” - Shelley Armitage
"Coolbrith was a poet of the nineteenth century, an artist whose poetics are steeped in Victorian rather than modem strategy,” but “in the final days of her life Coolbrith was heralded as a writer whose visible presence symbolized the link between an illustrious American literary past and its promising, optimistic present.” - Ravitz
Connections
On September 9, 1858, Coolbrith married the part-time actor and ironmonger Robert B. Carsley, but the union ended in divorce in 1861 after he threatened her and fired a pistol at her. They had one child, who died.
